What is Confidence BreakDown?


 Now, confidence is different from a lot of the other breakdowns that I've done, because so many of them are immediately visible in the tonality, body language, and other external signals. Confidence is more of an inside game, but it does leave clues, and that's what we're gonna be looking for. How do you get confident and how do you display it to other people? The person I've chosen is extremely confident--Conor McGregor. If you don't know him, he is in the UFC. He's about to fight for the title bout in just a few weeks, we'll see how that goes, but I want to start by showing you just a couple of clips if you're not familiar with him, to show you what his confidence looks like. Now you may be watching this and think, "Okay, what makes this guy so special? 

Everyone in professional sports is constantly trash talking. How do we know that this guy actually believes what he says he believes?"  First, Conor's opponent. I want to go back and pause that. Look what he does after he says that he's 100% confident. His eye twitches, he flinches his head, he starts to nod as if overcompensating and then makes this little shrugging attitude. One more time, because this is really important. These are the micro-expressions that believe a lack of confidence. Now, he might not be certain that he is going to lose, but he is not 100% confident and that is what it looks like. When you can not just let it sit with what you've just said. Contrast that with everything that you just saw from Conor. He can make these boastful, aggrandizing statements, and then, just sit there in it, because to him, it's as obvious as I have five fingers, as two plus two equals four. It is just a fact to him. So let's look at how he talks about how the fight's gonna go. 

Now he doesn't have a vision of what's gonna happen though, as you can clearly see. Yeah, throughout training camp, you definitely have shots that you see, that you feel cracking, you know, you feel them shots happen, you know, but this is, trust me, this is a fourth-round K.O. for me. I have no doubt in my mind. His toes will curl and I will celebrate. Now they cut that a little bit short, but you see, he can just sit thereafter he says that and that gives him such an advantage when he steps in the ring because while the other guy might really think that he has a great shot, he's got to be wondering what makes this guy so certain he's gonna win. How can he know? And that's what we want to explore now. How can you develop that sense of just absolute certainty that you're going to achieve your goals? Oh, by the way, before we get to that, for those of you who don't know the UFC and are curious, this is what happened in the fight in the first round. 


How do you get that kind of confidence? 

Well, the most important and the foundational piece is relevant experience. This is kind of a"Know the." If you've given 20 presentations before, you're gonna feel much more comfortable than you did when you gave your first. That is what relevant experience means. It means you've done something successfully in the past and you think that going forward, you will be able to continue to do it that way. Conor McGregor spells it out very clearly right here. My confidence comes from my performance, my work in the gym, my work ethic, you know. They don't walk out harder than me and they don't want it like I wanted, you know. My confidence comes from looking around at the division. I don't see anything in the division that troubles me; not one of them. They don't move like I move. They don't think like I think. And they don't talk like I talk. 

That's my confidence. Okay, so that's all well and great, but how do you become confident before you've got the experience, right? Because there are people like Conor McGregor who, for no reason at all, just came up and seemed to believe that they're going to be great when they had no reason to. Just check this out. I'm a professional MMA fighter with a record of 4 and 1, and I'm an up and coming fighter, and without a doubt, you will see me on the UPC in the near future, without a doubt. So that's in 2008 before he really has any good credible reason to believe he's going to do it. So how does that happen? And this is step 2. Step 2 is to focus on the things that you have control over. People who lack confidence tend to focus on the things that they don't have control over. Will people like the presentation? The guy that I'm going up against gonna be training? Conor, very singularly, when he is looking to be confident, focuses on the things that he has control over. Will he plan against a certain person and create a strategy that's going to be effective against them? Absolutely. But when he draws on his confidence, he doesn't go for anything that is outside of his control, and that's how it's 100% certain. Just check this out. So we've got two pieces so far. We've got relevant experiences and focusing on the things that you control. But I think it's this third piece that really separates Conor McGregor, and that is visualization. Visualization is how you can gain relevant experience--that first piece--without actually having to do it.

Why you can get scared of things that don't happen?

This is why we can go to movies and be terrified, even though it's not actually occurring. Use this to your own advantage. Go through, see the specific, concrete challenges that you might face in something, in some area where you want to be confident. I've seen Conor talk about one opponent he had who was a great wrestler. And he talked about how, yes, he was going to get taken down, but how he would beat him from the floor, and get back up. And it was very clear he had seen that happen and practiced it in his head over and over and over. And after seeing something play vividly so many times, you, too, will have the certainty that it is going to happen. That is the secret to Conor McGregor's confidence. So, in sum, the things that you can learn from Conor McGregor about confidence are one, yet relevant experience you need to practice. 


To be frank, all of the visualization in the world will not help if you cannot execute the basic mechanics of what you're trying to be confident in. But these things worry from person to person.  If you gave someone basketball that had never seen one and had them visualize making it, but didn't know how to shoot, all that visualization would be for naught because the idea of visualization is that it is a substitute for refinement and practice, but it cannot get you those basic, basic skills. It's for refinement. Second thing, draw on what you can control when you are trying to see why you are confident. Obviously, you're gonna want to strategize for things outside of your control--your opponent, the weather, whatever it is. But when you' rethinking why is this gonna work for me, go back to the things that you control the time you put in, the skills you have, the abilities that you developed those are all going to help you. And then, third, vivid visualization, not just of the victory that you want, but of the challenges that you will have to overcome to get there. But every time you go there, you will be going to feel lots of non-distractable influences.